Religion as a Political Tool

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sarah Sarzynski
Keyword(s):  
Social Movements ◽  
Popular Culture ◽  
Social Movement ◽  
Northeastern Brazil ◽  
Rural Workers ◽  
Brazilian Government ◽  
Government Documents ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
Religiously Based ◽  
Rural Social Movements

This chapter examines how discourses of religious practices and beliefs of messianism and Catholic radicalism functioned to both unite rural workers and criminalize the rural social movements, while also coding o Nordeste as fanatical and non-modern. By connecting films and popular culture to rural social movement publications and U.S. and Brazilian government documents, the chapter shows the conflicting ways in which political and cultural actors resurrected the historical messianic movement and war of Canudos (1896-7) in the 1960s. Conservatives emphasized the “fanatical” features of social movement leaders and participants, mobilizing the dominant stereotype of Nordestinos as religiously devious. Rural social movements established their own religiously based narrative of a revolutionary Jesus who fought against the wealthy for the poor. The radicalization of Catholic doctrine along with debates about the meaning of past struggles in the Northeast such as Canudos both shifted and upheld the prevailing constructions of Northeastern Brazil.

The Coronel and the Rural Poor

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sarah Sarzynski
Keyword(s):  
Popular Culture ◽  
Northeastern Brazil ◽  
Rural Poor ◽  
Rural Workers ◽  
Rural Worker ◽  
The Third ◽  
Poverty And Inequality ◽  
Historical Figure ◽  
Rural Social Movements

The third chapter evaluates discursive debates over the potential for change in Northeastern Brazil and competing descriptions of regional poverty as a motivation for or limitation to change. It examines representations of the nordestino landowning rural elite and the rural worker in the 1950s and 60s in popular culture, rural social movement publications, and conservative discourse. Although hegemonic perceptions of rural workers drew on historical notions of nordestino poverty as an inherent condition, rural social movements appealed to rural men’s honor and masculinity to encourage resistance to the landowner’s power, gain support for agrarian reform, and advocate for class struggle. At the same time, rural elites looked to the past to find a symbol for a “new Northeast.” In their effort to redefine the role of rural elites, they appropriated the historical figure of the coronél as a solution to poverty and inequality in Northeastern Brazil, applauding a patriarchal modernization.

scholarly journals Contesting Market-Based Conservation: Payments for Ecosystem Services as a Surface of Engagement for Rural Social Movements in Mexico

2013 ◽  
Vol 6 (1) ◽  
pp. 134-150 ◽  
Author(s):  
Elizabeth Shapiro-Garza
Keyword(s):  
Social Movements ◽  
Ecosystem Services ◽  
Social Movement ◽  
Financial Incentives ◽  
Technical Assistance ◽  
Federal State ◽  
International Lending ◽  
Non Governmental Organizations ◽  
Lending Institutions ◽  
Rural Social Movements

The Mexican national Payment for Ecosystem Services (PES) programs, which provide financial incentives for rural landholders to conserve forest, were originally designed under the logic of market-based conservation. Based on a multi-sited, multi-scalar ethnography of Mexico's PES programs, this article examines the process through which a national rural social movement was able to redefine the market-based narrative of PES, the historical and political context that provided this window of opportunity, and the ways in which the movement's engagement led to a hybridization of the policy itself. The involvement of the rural social movement introduced a very different conception of PES – as a recognition by Mexico's federal state and urban society of the value of campesino (peasant) environmental stewardship and the economic support needed to allow these stewards to remain on the land. The direct involvement of movement members in the redesign of the programs had a significant impact on their conformation that reflected this vision of revaluing the rural: the inclusion of agroforests and sustainably managed timber lands; requirements for self-defined forest management plans; provision of dedicated funding for technical assistance; and the training of local extensionists. In mapping the evolution of the Mexican national PES programs we can begin to see how, in this particular place and time, rural social movements employed PES as “useful surfaces of engagement” (Escobar 1999: 13) for contesting the market-based notions of the federal state, international lending institutions and conservation non-governmental organizations. I position this analysis in the context of the global project of “grabbing green” and as an example of the frictions that can inhibit and even partially reverse the logic of the seemingly inexorable rise of market-based conservation policy and projects.

scholarly journals Agroecological Formación in Rural Social Movements

2014 ◽  
Vol 98 ◽  
pp. 31-37 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nils McCune ◽  
Juan Reardon ◽  
Peter Rosset
Keyword(s):  
Social Movements ◽  
Social Movement ◽  
Food System ◽  
Food Sovereignty ◽  
Ways Of Knowing ◽  
Agricultural Landscapes ◽  
Small Scale ◽  
Ecological Processes ◽  
Local Circuits ◽  
Rural Social Movements

Among the many sectors currently engaged in struggle against the corporate food system, small farmers play a particularly important role—not only do they constitute a legitimate alternative to global agribusiness, but also they are the heirs to long traditions of local knowledge and practice. In defending peasant agriculture, rural social movements defend popular control over seeds and genetic resources, water, land and territory against the onslaught of globalized financial capital. A framework called food sovereignty has been developed by the international peasant movement La Via Campesina (LVC), to encompass the various elements of a food system alternative based on reclaiming popular resource control, defending small-scale agriculture and traditional knowledge, rebuilding local circuits of food and labor, and recovering the ecological processes that can make farming sustainable. Recognizing the need to develop “movement people” capable of integrating many ecological, social, cultural and political criteria into their organizational activities, LVC increasingly has articulated processes of popular education and consciousness-raising as part of the global social movement for agroecology and food sovereignty. Given the enormous diversity of organizations and actors in LVC, an underlying feature known in Spanish as diálogo de saberes (roughly the equivalent of “dialogue between ways of knowing”) has characterized LVC processes of education, training, formation and exchange in agroecology. The diálogo de saberes takes place at the level of training centers and schools of the LVC organizations, as well as the larger scale of agricultural landscapes and peasant territories. The interactions between peasant, family or communal farmers, their organizations, their youth and their agroecology create social processes that assume the form and dynamic of a social movement in several countries of Latin America.

SOCIAL MOVEMENT THEORY: LESSONS FROM THE SOCIOLOGY OF W. E. B. DU BOIS*

2019 ◽  
Vol 24 (2) ◽  
pp. 125-136
Author(s):  
Aldon Morris
Keyword(s):  
Social Movements ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
Social Movement ◽  
Black Community ◽  
Lived Experiences ◽  
Black People ◽  
Accurate Analysis ◽  
Movement Theory ◽  
Du Bois ◽  
The 1960S

This article addresses why movement scholars had no idea that the civil rights and black power movements of the 1960s and 70s were imminent. In fact, their theories led them to predict that these movements were impossible because only whites possessed history-making agency. These scholars accepted the dogma that black people, their culture, and their institutions were inferior and incapable of organizing and leading powerful movements. This article demonstrates that the black sociologist W. E. B. Du Bois predicted those movements a half century before they occurred. He did so because he conducted concrete empirical analyses of the black community, and his lived experiences led him to reject the thesis of black inferiority. This article argues that the field of social movements remains too white and elitist and that this condition causes less robust and accurate analysis. The article suggests ways to make needed changes.

Living Labour and Social Movements: A Dialogue with Antonio Negri

2017 ◽  
Vol 17 (4) ◽  
pp. 518-525 ◽  
Author(s):  
Daniela Chironi ◽  
Federico Tomasello
Keyword(s):  
Social Movements ◽  
Social Movement ◽  
Class Struggle ◽  
Sociology Of Religion ◽  
Carl Schmitt ◽  
The Political ◽  
Radical Critique ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
Antonio Negri ◽  
Financial Capitalism

In this interview, Antonio Negri first focuses on the possibility of defining the concept of ‘social movement’. By mobilizing a spectrum of references that goes from Carl Schmitt to the Weberian sociology of religion, he insists on the necessity, not to sociologically crystallize the concept, but, instead, to think about it in a historical manner. Social movements would then be attempts at activating ‘liberation processes’, which nowadays can only be thought of within the conditions of financial capitalism. Negri then proceeds to examine the relation between the concept of social movement and those of class and class struggle: he suggests a dynamic and relational interpretation of the Marxian concept of ‘living labour’ as a bridge between a class analysis of society and the study of social movements, movements which in the contemporary landscape are ready to take an ‘entrepreneurial’ connotation. The political and intellectual experience of Italian Workerism in the 1960s is then recalled as a fertile example of the application of this method of social analysis, but also as an exemplification of the principle of ‘unrepeatability’ of social movements. The author finally claims to be a ‘theorist of immaterial labour’ in order to then develop a radical critique of the idea of so-called ‘post-materialist’ movements and of the effects that such a notion has had on the sociology of social movements.

scholarly journals Social Movement Literature and U.S. Labour: A Reassessment

2014 ◽  
Vol 8 (2) ◽  
pp. 165-179
Author(s):  
Keith Mann
Keyword(s):  
Social Movements ◽  
Social Movement ◽  
Occupy Wall Street ◽  
New Social Movements ◽  
Wall Street ◽  
Labour Movement ◽  
Common Features ◽  
1960S And 1970S ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
The Arab Spring

Largely due to its conservative profile at the time, the U.S. labour movement was largely absent from modern social movement literature as it developed in response to the new social movements of the 1960s and 1970s. Recent labour mobilizations such as the Wisconsin uprising and the Chicago Teachers’ strike have been part of the current international cycle of protest that includes the Arab Spring, the antiausterity movements in Greece and Spain, and Occupy Wall Street. These struggles suggest that a new labour movement is emerging that shares many common features with new social movements. This article offers a general analysis of these and other contemporary labour struggles in light of contemporary modern social movement literature. It also critically reviews assumptions about the labour movement of the 1960s and 1970s and reexamines several social movement concepts.

scholarly journals Islamic "New Social Movements"? Radical Islam, AL-QA'IDA and Social Movement Theory

2006 ◽  
Vol 11 (1) ◽  
pp. 101-115 ◽  
Author(s):  
Philip Sutton ◽  
Stephen Vertigans
Keyword(s):  
Social Movements ◽  
Social Movement ◽  
Unique Character ◽  
Radical Islam ◽  
Movement Organization ◽  
Key Characteristics ◽  
The Social ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
New Social Movement ◽  
Post Industrial

European new social movement (NSM) theory was developed to describe and explain the apparently unique character of the wave of collective action that began in the 1960s and continues to this day. Key characteristics of NSM theory are a post-industrial orientation, middle-class activist core, loose organizational form, use of symbolic direct actions, creation of new identities, and a "self-limiting radicalism." The theory's claims to movement innovation were later criticized by many as exaggerated and ahistorical. However, the filtering down of key NSM elements into social movement studies has led to changing definitions of what social movements actually are and opened up new opportunities for the integration of religious movements into the social movements mainstream. Using the case of radical Islam, and with particular reference to the terrorist social movement organization al-Qa'ida, this article argues that drawing on key features of NSM theory should lead to a better understanding of radical Islam as well as a more realistic explanation of its continuing development and transformation.

Rural Social Movements in Brazil in the Second Half of the 20th Century: From the Peasant Leagues to the Landless Workers’ Movement

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Leonilde Servolo de Medeiros
Keyword(s):  
Social Movements ◽  
Rural Areas ◽  
Labor Union ◽  
Small Farmers ◽  
Rural Workers ◽  
Rubber Tappers ◽  
Union Activists ◽  
Landless Rural Workers Movement ◽  
Landless Workers Movement ◽  
Rural Social Movements

The struggle for land pervades Brazilian history, but it was not until the 1950s that various groups coalesced, thus forging the basis of a national peasant movement. Prior to the military dictatorship, small farmers associations and Peasant Leagues, irrespective of their strategies, had placed agrarian reform in the public spotlight. Since then, the issue has become the driving force for rural social movements. The 1964 coup violently suppressed these organizations, persecuting peasant and rural labor union activists. At the same time, it created legal mechanisms to make land expropriation viable while giving incentives for massive technological modernization in rural areas. It also encouraged the occupation of frontier zones by corporations. Such initiatives aggravated the land issue in the country in areas of recent and historical occupation rather than alleviating it. By the late 1970s, new actors emerged, putting land disputes back onto the political arena: landless workers, rubber tappers, small farmers, squatters, and the indigenous peoples. New organizations emerged, sometimes in opposition to rural workers’ unions, which performed a relevant role during the dictatorship while at other times working from within them. One of these emerging actors was the Landless Rural Workers’ Movement (Movimento dos Trabalhadores Rurais sem Terra, MST), which stood out nationally and internationally due to its innovative approach in terms of strategies such as land occupations and encampments, and in the late 1990s by building networks with other organizations worldwide, as is the case with the Via Campesina. In parallel to that, family farmers also became politicized as they demanded public policies through union organizations to survive in a rural environment controlled by large entrepreneurs.

scholarly journals Prefigurative Politics and Social Movement Strategy: The Roles of Prefiguration in the Reproduction, Mobilisation and Coordination of Movements

2020 ◽  
pp. 003232172093604
Author(s):  
Luke Yates
Keyword(s):  
Social Movements ◽  
Social Movement ◽  
Recent Work ◽  
New Social Movements ◽  
Movement Strategy ◽  
Prefigurative Politics ◽  
The 1960S

Recent work historicises and theoretically refines the concept of prefigurative politics. Yet disagreements over the question of whether or how it is politically effective remain. What roles does prefiguration play in strategies of transformation, and what implications does it have for understandings of strategy? The article begins to answer this question by tracking the concept’s use, from discussions of left strategy in the 1960s, a qualifier of new social movements in the 1980s–1990s, its application to protest events in the 2000s, to its contemporary proliferation of meanings. This contextualises reflections on the changing arguments about the roles of prefiguration in social movement strategy. Based on literature about strategy, three essential categories of applied movement strategy are identified: reproduction, mobilisation and coordination. Prefigurative dynamics are part of all three, showing that the reproduction of movements is strategically significant, while the coordination of movements can take various ‘prefigurative’ forms.

The Return of The Repressed: The Fall and Rise of Emotions in Social Movement Theory

2000 ◽  
Vol 5 (1) ◽  
pp. 65-83 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jeff Goodwin ◽  
James Jasper ◽  
Francesca Polletta
Keyword(s):  
Social Movements ◽  
Social Movement ◽  
Social Life ◽  
Early Years ◽  
Social Movement Theory ◽  
Movement Theory ◽  
Catching Up ◽  
History Of ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
Fertile Area

In recent years sociologists have made great strides in studying the emotions that pervade social life. The study of social movements has lagged behind, even though there are few arenas where emotions are more obvious or important. We hope to understand this lag as well as make some suggestions for catching up. To do this we examine the history of scholarship on social movements, finding that emotions were poorly specified in the early years, ignored entirely in the structural and organizational paradigms that emerged in the 1960s, and still overlooked in the cultural era of the 1980s and 1990s. Despite isolated efforts to understand the emotions of social movements, they remain today a fertile area for inquiry.

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